Last time, I was a tease and only showed my feet. Today…a bit more.
Furnaces going cold
Back in 2009, Ranat on Beyond the Hills posted a list of all the blogs written by submissive or switch guys she could find. That, in and of itself, created a vibrant conversation (as you can see in the comments).
Flash forward to now. Ranat has apparently abandoned her blog. The last post was from April…of 2012. The one before that was posted in September of 2011. The most recent comments appear to be from spammers. Except this one, left by the inimitable Tom, from just the other day:
So, here we are, 4 years after, and I just happened to be searching for FLR-type blogs, preferably ones run by women. I Googled into this discussion, and realized that most of the blogs you’ve listed are long dead — except, interestingly, for the ones that you’ve noted as being non-traditional.
But the bigger point is that 3/4 of those blogs are dead, and yet I haven’t found any decent replacement blogs that aren’t more of the same.
He said that on a dead blog. Ironic.
The thing is…blogging is hard. It’s hard even when you’re not blogging about your life and your failures (as so many FLR blogs end up being about since they’re often written by guys in relationships with women uninterested in being the F in an LR). Also, even though it’s just four years ago, the internet is a very different place now. There’s Facebook (which, of course, there was four years ago, but it’s SO MUCH BIGGER now). There’s Twitter (also, around four years ago and, also, bigger now than then). A metric crap ton of the conversation that used to happen in blog comments happens on Twitter and, I admit, I feel a little left out because browsing Twitter is like drinking out of a fire hose. Be that as it may, it certainly is true that blogs (like this one, I suppose) seem to flame out. Just the other day Belle was saying how it seems like the people who comment on this blog seem to be all different than in the “old days.” It’s true.
It’s somewhat depressing. You “meet” these people, in a way (and sometimes, you actually do meet them), you enter into their lives through their writing, you follow their ups and downs, and then, one day, they’re gone. It doesn’t always happen at once. They just post less often, they comment less often (the only way you know they’re reading your stuff), and then…nothing. They go quiet. They disappear. Many of the links on my own (infrequently attended) blogroll are defunct.
Of course, these are blogs about personal things. People change. They evolve and grow and move on. I think a lot of people blog for very specific reasons. Like, blogging helps people (like me) process and think and learn about themselves or get through a difficult time in their lives. In many cases, once the need for them is done, they’re abandoned and go to seed or are imploded by their owners. And for those of us “left behind” it can be hard. I said over on Ranat’s old post that it’s weird to be having a discussion on a blog that’s been left for dead. Like going to your high school best friend’s parent’s house and hanging out by the pool like in the old days even though your friend doesn’t live there anymore and the pool’s empty and the house is boarded up.
I said that to a new blogger on the scene who calls himself Schnoff. He’s only got the two posts so far, but I like his stuff a lot. I like that he’s gay if only because there are so few voices speaking from that perspective on this topic that I know of (and, as I’ve said, I find gay guys playing with chastity and denial totally hot). Will he last? I can’t say. There have been other exciting new voices who open up and then disappear just as quickly. I hope he sticks around.
And then there’s this blog. In a way, I still feel a bit like the new kid, though I know I’m not. I’m veritably venerable at this point. I admit that my fire to blog waxes and wanes and I’m finding myself, for whatever reason, disinclined to give the kind of blow by blow accounts of our sex life as I once did. I feel like I’m in some kind of metamorphosis state, though it could just as easily be a kind of torpor I’ll snap out of at some point. What is the point of Denying Thumper anymore? It’s not here for the reasons that started it, that’s for sure. Sometimes I think it’s inertia. That act of blogging and writing begets more blogging and writing. Let it go cold, and it dies. Maybe that’s what happened to some of those old bloggers. They let their furnaces go cold.
No, I’m not announcing anything. I’m still doing this. I’m not going to go cold. In a way, I feel like a dinosaur. Not old, but doing an old-feeling thing. Like a cold-blooded creature that needs to keep active to survive while a bunch of warm-blooded newbies skitter around my feet.
I guess what I’m saying is I know where Tom’s coming from. I feel it, too.
An old friend drops by
Imagine my surprise yesterday when I saw in my notifications that a guy I know from way back in high school is now following this blog. I wasn’t all, “Oh god, hide the flogger and penis pictures, quick!” But I was, “Hmm. How’d he happen to find my little corner of the internet?” So I asked him.
Turns out, WordPress may have been the culprit. I haven’t tried this myself, but apparently you can “find friends” through the WP back-end (I found friends through my back-end, once upon a time, but in a different way). Somehow, through the intricacies and annoyingly complicated tendrils of the social interwebs, my friend (whom I will now call J) was suggested his old high school buddy’s secret sex blog. This is odd because I’ve tried to be somewhat careful with regard to keeping my two web presences disconnected. I have a Facebook account for Thumper and me, but I’ve never connected mine to this blog, just Thumper’s. I also have separate Gmail accounts.
Ah, well. As I’ve said many times in my professional life, there is no such thing as privacy on the internet.
J asked if I was OK with him reading my blog. I thought that was nice. I basically said, well, I put it out there to be read, so if you’re game, go for it. I am, ultimately, not ashamed of this site or myself and J is an old enough friend from so far back (when all our sexualities were bumping around each other like baby hippos learning to walk on land) that at least 17% of that I write here won’t come as a surprise to him.
I sometimes (well, a lot of the time) resent the whole “code of anonymity” thing that comes with blogging about one’s sex life. This is sort of the opposite issue from the other day (or maybe it’s the ultimate symptom of it), but sometimes I wish none of this was secret. It adds a layer of emotional and mental overhead that I’m not crazy about. Now J knows. Add him to the two or three other people who know me in real life who are also aware. Funny, the sky hasn’t fallen.
The way I think about it is this. I will not advertise to anyone in my circle of friends, family, or coworkers that this is who I am. Some people do advertise and vociferously, of course, and more power to them, but I don’t like living that way. But, I will not deny who I am when the subject comes up, however it comes up. If someone happens upon this site accidentally, I can’t be blamed. I did my best to keep them from having to know this about me (there are people I know whose sex blogs would drive me screaming into the hills, so I’m not pretending everyone I’m acquainted with really and truly wants to see my penis selfies). However, if after they find it, they don’t spontaneously combust and actually start to explore this part of my life, I would prefer that they somehow make it known to me that they’re doing it. It won’t change anything about how I do this, but I’d like to know just the same.
Bean spilling
I have a couple friends with whom, regardless of time apart, I can fall into conversation with as if we did it every day. One is the boy I kinda sorta dated during high school and after who ended up being the best man in my wedding and the other is a friend I met though work twenty-some years ago (and to even be able to write a sentence with that kind of time span in it freaks me out). Last night, she was in town on business. It happens somewhat infrequently, but we ended up having a lot of one-on-one time. I suppose I should come up with a name for her, but I can’t think of anything at the moment so she’s just “her.”
So anyway, we spent a lot of time taking about our personal lives and how they’ve evolved over the years. Both of us happened to fall in love with married people at about the same time, though the outcomes were very different, so there was much catching up and comparing of experiences. Also, after I first moved to this city, I wrote a lot. I did this because I was an angst-filled youth in a new town with no friends and not even a TV. There was time, so I wrote. Not unlike how I write now, but that was all fiction while none of this is. I used to send it to her to read back then. This was, of course, before the internet. We’re talking wood pulp marked with petroleum-based ink being manhandled by government workers.
In any event, she asked me a couple times if I still wrote and I gave sort of mumbling noncommittal answers. She even suggested I was writing in secret which was either very perceptive or a lucky guess, but she eventually pressed me by saying, “You don’t even have a blog or anything?”
“Oh, I have a blog.” What? How are you going to explain this, bunny boy?
I guess I thought I’d just say it was secret and leave it at that, but over the years we had shared very personal details about ourselves and she was having none of it. She wanted to know what it was about and why was it a secret. I told her it was started immediately after Belle and I had issues in our marriage and it detailed our relationship. She pressed some more. I said it also described my evolving sexuality. She said she knew I was queer and I said there’s a lot more to sexuality than gender preferences. Finally, I told her reading the blog was not unlike cracking open my head and peering into the most intimate and private part of my brain. And that there were explicit pictures. Of me.
She was perturbed. She felt I was keeping it a secret, even then, because I didn’t have faith in her and didn’t think she could handle what she saw there. I tried to explain that it was not that at all. That not everyone wants to know the kinds of things I say here about the people they associate with. I have many friends whose sex life I’m not even remotely interested in and frankly don’t want to hear about. My reticence in divulging the blog and its contents were out of respect for her right not to know everything about me. But she wasn’t buying it. Then I got nervous.
It’s not that this blog is embarrassing to me. It’s not. Really. This is who I am and I have no issues with it, but there are only two people I know of who know me personally who also know about this blog (and I’m married to one of them). Widening that circle is sort of a big deal. Also, it’s not just about me. Belle’s in here, too. At this point, I maintain my secret identity mostly out of respect for her.
In the end, I spilled my guts. Everything. We discussed my perversions, we discussed the relationship dynamic, we talked hardware, she knows I haven’t come in a month. The sky did not fall. There were many questions and I was forthcoming with answers to them all. We have very different life perspectives, but we respect one another and (I assume) her opinion of me is safe (but there are almost 700 posts here for her to read, so we’ll see how that goes).
So now there are three people who know (you know, not counting the teeming horde of you guys who come and read my drivel).